“BuzzClan solved our datacenter footprint problem by creating a new, Exalytics-based architecture that uses only a fraction of the rack space that the previous deployment required. The new system is already giving us substantially improved performance, ample room for growth, and our team has regained direct control of our BI environments.”
– Director of Business Intelligence

The Problem

The customer is a major financial services firm with over $10B in assets under management, and annual earnings of nearly $3B, and was faced with the corporate requirement to downsize datacenter footprint on the one hand, and the growing demand for Business Intelligence applications on the other hand. Along with the growing demand for BI applications comes the need for the features of the latest versions of several BI tools; regression testing new tool versions to be deployed to a large number of servers is a lengthy and expensive process. The situation was further complicated by the sheer size and complexity of the company’s network infrastructure, making the restructuring of the current BI systems very challenging, requiring the involvement of numerous IT departments.

The BuzzClan Solution

Given that the customer BI infrastructure was based on the Oracle Fusion BI tools suite, BuzzClan determined that leveraging Exalytics was the optimal strategy. The BuzzClan team formulating a solution that employed a highly-available, two-node Exalytics cluster for production operations, and one Exalytics system each for disaster recovery and development/test environments. BuzzClan partnered with the networking, storage, server administration, directory services, and security teams, to develop and then execute the applications migration plan. BuzzClan worked with the BI department to understand every detail of each of the OBIEE and EPM applications, and then used that knowledge to fully exploit the combination of OBIEE, TimesTen, EPM, and Exalytics. Changes were made on the OBIEE RPD physical and logical layers to optimize certain existing queries, and to leverage Logical Source Tables to point to a newly designed version of the hierarchical aggregated data that resides in the TimesTen in-memory database server. The existing DW ETL strategy was overhauled, aggregate data is no longer loaded into the DW, but is now loaded into the TimesTen database.

Highlights

“BuzzClan solved our datacenter footprint problem by creating a new, Exalytics-based architecture that uses only a fraction of the rack space that the previous deployment required. The new system is already giving us substantially improved performance, ample room for growth, and our team has regained direct control of our BI environments.”
– Director of Business Intelligence

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